Angie

Angie

The ads for “Angie” promise a light-hearted comedy about a cheerful young woman who has a baby out of wedlock, and upsets her friends, although not too badly. The movie itself delivers all that, and more so much more than the burden finally weighs down the story, which collapses under its own gathering gloom. This is not so much a comedy as a soap opera crossed with confessions from the daytime TV talk shows.

Geena Davis stars in the movie as Angie, and let it be said that she is equal to all of the twists and turns that the odd screenplay subjects her to. She has a lightness, a brightness, that is always welcome on the screen, and she was the right choice to play the character that “Angie” initially seems to be about. No actress could have played the character the movie finally turns out to be about; too many things happen in two hours.

Angie grows up with her best friend Tina (Aida Turturro, very high energy and convincing) in an ethnic neighborhood where guys hang around on street corners making hopeful groin movements when girls walk by, and are kind of flattered if they get noticed.

She works in Manhattan. She has been engaged for years to Vinnie (James Gandolfini), but somehow they’ve never gotten married. Then she gets pregnant, and Vinnie wants them to race each other down an aisle, but Angie isn’t so sure there should be any rush. For one thing, she’s met another guy an Irish lawyer named Noel (Stephen Rea) who is sweet and funny and sort of like big puppy dog.

This leads to predictable results around the house she still shares with her dad (Philip Bosco) and stepmother (Jenny O’Hara). Her mother packed up and moved out when Angie was 3 years old; the neighbors vaguely remember that she liked to dance in the snow.

Everybody close to Angie thinks she should get married, and that Vinnie is a perfectly nice guy. But he’s starting to get bossy. And possessive. And then there’s Noel, who is so understanding, and.

It’s about here that the movie seriously loses its way. The baby is born, and there are complications (at least one more complication, in my opinion, than the movie possibly needed). There are also complications with Noel (such arbitrary complications they come from a screenplay, not life). And there’s a frantic cross-country bus trip in search of the long lost mother, leading to as sequence so pointless that when it’s over the movie sort of stands around wondering what to do next.

The second half of “Angie” consists mostly of plot inventions that do not flow naturally out of the tone or logic of what went before. It’s as if “Angie” begins as a long, slow ascent toward some possible goal a lonely young woman’s romance with her Irish lawyer and then turns into a roller-coaster ride through the rain forest into darkness.

The movie’s best part is the friendship between Davis and Turturro as two lifelong friends. Turturro has married a man who’s not exactly a saint, but she believes in marriage in sticking with something once you’ve committed to it. Angie, on the other hand, is haunted by her mother dancing in the snow, and is more of a free spirit.

But somewhere along the line as her life becomes one crisis after another seemingly at random we lose track of where this movie was headed. It’s desperate on a dime episodic. And if you think this is going to be a comedy? You’re in for some surprises.

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